I've seen hype spread across the Internet about Norton Internet Security & Firewall blocking advertisements, such as banner ads and even Google ad links. There have been screenshots of such things happening so it really raised my awareness and I changed things across my websites that were in my control of doing.

Tonight, I finally bit the bullet and downloaded the trial version of Norton IS, because I set off to write an article on one of my new sites but wanted to have my own real life facts rather than basing my article on what I've read online and even in magazines.

With Norton IS installed, and double-checking to make absolutely sure that ad blocking was in fact on by default, I fired up my browser and immediately went to my main website where I run Adsense. From what I've read, Norton IS strips out the links for Adsense. My site comes up, and sure enough, there is every link in place as it should be.

I then went to Google and searched a term I knew would bring up relevant ads and even there, nothing harmed. Every ad fully showing with links and all. I went back and double checked ad blocking, and even turned it off and returned to the previous pages, and turned ad blocking back on and returned once again to these pages. Nothing changed.

One of the biggest hyped sites that has been said to have been effected by this is phillyburbs.com. Ads removed, navigation removed, and so on. Phillyburbs.com comes up, and I see a 468 x 60 banner at the top and other various advertisements throughout the front page. Although it seems they've redesigned the site somewhat differently from screenshots I've seen and the area where the navigation that was once "removed" is now hosting a skyscraper banner ad. I checked the URL of the 468 banner and it even has "ads" in the URL, which is supposed to be one of the main attacks of Norton IS.

I've checked dozens of web pages with all the "attacked" ads, links and file/directory names and have seen every ad, every image, every link.

So what's the deal? Is all this just hype? Does my freshly downloaded Norton IS have a bug? Did Norton change anything in the program? Even the current issue of Revenue magazine devoted a 1/4 page article to this exact thing. It seemed to be a critical issue in the world of affiliate marketing and advertising but I see nothing but what I should be seeing.

chromate

06-17-2004, 03:58 AM

Either you have a bug or Norton have changed something. I've had MAJOR problems with NIS whilst working on a client's site. The site sells used trucks. The client in question was getting calls daily from users saying that they couldn't see thumbnail images of the trucks in the search results. Sure enough, all these users were using NIS and had it turned on. After much playing about, the only way I could get the images to load was to change their size to numbers that weren't so rounded, like width=187 instead of width=190.

I hate, hate, HATE NIS.

Chris

06-17-2004, 06:41 AM

I won't buy anything Norton. I hope that company goes under and the CEO is arrested.

Kyle

06-17-2004, 07:35 AM

Hahaha. Nice post Chris. What would he be arrested for? I'm not informed on this.

Chris

06-17-2004, 07:56 AM

Pissing me off?

shim

06-17-2004, 11:21 AM

Shim's 'Software-to-get-List':
Norton's Antivirus Software

Ok... Maybe not ;)

incka

06-17-2004, 12:01 PM

I think Price-Fixing is a good way to get him arrested... Ever noticed how Norton and the other main one have very similar prices and they go up not down?